Scoleciphobia
by sdbubbles
Summary: An eventful journey across a waterlogged car park.


**A/N: This is not what I usually write but who cares? I needed a distraction. And this is what I used to do in primary school (I still sometimes do it). It used to take me about forty minutes to cross the playground after it rained. It was ridiculous!**

**Sarah x**

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Hanssen watched curiously as Serena Campbell was crossing the semi-flooded car park. She was tip-toeing, almost dancing across the car park, occasionally darting backwards and sideways. He approached her with caution, knowing she was more than liable to bite his head off. "Ms. Campbell, what on _Earth_ are you doing?" he asked her. She didn't answer, obviously concentrating intently on what she was doing and yet trying to do it as quickly as she could.

He watched her for about five minutes and, in that time, she had travelled all of three feet ahead of her. He'd never seen her act so ridiculously before. He had seen her act petulantly, arrogantly, deviously and just downright unpleasantly, but never ridiculous like she was doing now.

He looked down and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Tarmac, flood water and worms, most of whom appeared to have died. Just then, one of the worms moved and she gave a small squeak. She sounded a little like a small child.

Then it dawned on him. "Scoleciphobia?" he asked her cynically. "Really, Ms. Campbell?"

"Shut up," she snarled, fixated on dancing around the worms; her aggression surprised him slightly. The bottoms of her trousers were getting wet as a consequence of her irrational behaviour, but she seemed to think it a fair price pay if she did not come into contact with a perfectly harmless worm.

"You know most of them are dead, don't you?" he challenged her as he practically stood still to keep up with her snail's pace. In all fairness, he was probably enjoying the sight of Serena Campbell dancing around worms slightly more than was necessary. It felt a little like she was paying for all the wrong she had done to him.

"So?!" she snapped.

Michael Spence passed them and turned around to see what was going on; he was so interested that he walked backwards into a railing and lost his balance, falling back onto the flooded pavement. Hanssen suppressed a smile at the embarrassment Michael was suffering for his nosiness as Jac Naylor snorted when she saw him.

Jac then saw Serena and did not say a word but looked at her like she was mad. Mind you, perhaps the cold CT surgeon had a point. Serena did not look like the perfect picture of sanity at the moment.

Hanssen could hear Michael's shout of, "Damn!" from across the car park, which was a fair bit away – Serena still had made very, very little progress. She had probably moved less than a metre in the time Hanssen had been following her. "What's up, Rena?!" Michael called, and Hanssen saw he was both amused at the sight before him and perhaps a little worried about Serena's sanity.

"Shut it, Michael!" she retorted loudly. She darted sideways and Hanssen looked down to see a wriggling worm on the ground. It was a bit surreal to see a version of Serena Campbell who was terrified of something that could not possibly bring her any harm.

"You cannot actually be trying to tell me you have scoleciphobia to the degree that it reduces you a frightened schoolgirl?" he said to her.

"My granddad had it too," she retorted. He shook his head to himself when he realised that, actually, she was absolutely deadly serious. Serena Campbell actually had a phobia of worms.

Jonny Maconie approached on Serena's other side. "You OK, Ms. Campbell?" he asked her, looking at Hanssen for an answer. She lost her balance and Hanssen and Jonny immediately took an arm each to keep her upright. Once she regained her equilibrium, she yanked her arms free of their grasp.

"I can deal with Ms. Campbell," he told Jonny. "You'd better get up to Darwin. Keeping Miss Naylor waiting is rarely a wise idea."

"Good point," Jonny said, and he dashed away, his trainers probably filling up with water as he did so. Michael had given up on working out what Serena was doing and had gone inside, presumably to change into scrubs as soon as humanly possible now that his jeans were soaked through.

Hanssen looked at his watch. To his disbelief he found he had been with Serena now for over ten minutes and she wasn't even halfway across the car park. "Ms. Campbell, how long have you been trying to get inside?" She shrugged, too preoccupied to even care how much time she had wasted avoiding worms.

She tripped and fell backwards onto the bonnet of a car; it wasn't until he was on top of her and could feel the heat of her body and smell the sweetness of her breath that he realised she had grabbed onto his jacket at the very last moment and pulled him over with her. She looked down – prompting him to mirror her – and squealed when she discovered that she was standing on a worm. She pushed herself back onto the car so he feet were no longer on the ground and could no longer come into contact with dead worms.

He rolled his eyes at her irrationality. "You must be joking," he muttered. He had never thought she would have had a phobia, and certainly not one that caused her to scramble up onto the bonnet of an unknown person's car so she – or anything attached to her – would not have to come into contact with a worm.

She must have heard him because she retorted icily, "Does it look like it, Mr. Hanssen? Do I look like I am fucking joking to you?!"

"Now now, Ms. Campbell," he replied, surprised at her outburst and the language she had used. "There's no need for swearing." She glared at him – the same glare that made F1s scurry away and hide – and he sighed. He realised now that she was not going to get off of this car. "This is absurd!" he commented.

"And?!" she replied, obviously going on the defensive and perhaps panicking slightly about having to make her way through the minefield everyone else called the car park. He did feel for her though; he understood that a phobia was something serious, and she did look like she genuinely had scoleciphobia.

He looked up and saw that it was about to rain again. The way he saw it, there was only one way around the problem of getting Serena into the hospital without her freaking out again.

"Take this," he ordered her, resignedly giving her his briefcase.

"Why?"

"Just do it! I'm not going to stand and argue with you until it rains and we both end up drenched," he explained.

She reluctantly took his briefcase and he scooped her into his arms. "Oi!" she shouted. "Put me down!"

"Next to the worms?" he raised an eyebrow at her as he started to walk across the second half of her journey. She glared at him again and he said, feeling slightly vindicated for his actions, "Thought not."

She groaned and put her arms around his neck so he didn't have to keep her balance for her as well. "Since when were you this nice?" she challenged him.

"This is not being nice. This is to get you in your scrubs and into theatre," he answered, though he had felt slightly sorry for her as she struggled to make her way through the localised flooding and the minefield of worms and thought this would have been kinder once he realised she really was pathologically afraid of them.

"Yeah, yeah," she dismissed. "Don't worry. I won't tell anyone you did this because, underneath all the iceman sarcasm, you're actually the unfailing gentleman."

"And I won't tell anyone you turn into a crying baby when faced with worms, and dead ones at that."

"I wasn't crying."

"They don't know that."

He was taking longer than strictly necessary to deliver her safely inside; he found he was rather enjoying himself here. "Why, Mr. Hanssen, you wicked man," she drawled. He repressed a smile when she grinned at him; up close, her smile was almost dazzling.

In retaliation to her impudence he didn't put her down until they were at the lifts and everyone had seen Serena Campbell being carried into the building by Henrik Hanssen. It was with some degree of satisfaction that he watched her turn pink with embarrassment. "That was mean," she accused.

"So are you," he pointed out. They got in the lift and she grinned up at him, looking quite dazed as she handed him back his briefcase. Once the doors closed and they were totally alone, it was his turn to be left stunned when she stretched up and kissed his cheek gently. "What was that for?" he asked her softly.

"Not making me walk across the car park," she smiled. "And not complaining that I've probably given you a bad back because I can't stand worms and I weigh a ton."

"There's nothing wrong with your weight," he immediately answered. "I should know. I'm the one who carried you into the building, after all."

She just smiled and shook her head as the lift doors opened and they stepped onto Keller together. Michael, Hanssen noticed, was already in his red scrubs and dishing out orders to Malick, Arthur and Chantelle.

He watched Serena join them and allowed a smile at the bizarre, vulnerable, almost cute side he had seen of Serena Campbell. He probably would never be able to look at her the same way again after that fiasco, but he didn't really want to. He preferred this version of Serena; he knew this version was human.

He stalked over and sat down at the nurses station as Michael, Arthur, Chantelle and Malick dispersed. As Serena passed him, she smirked, "Gentleman."

"Crybaby," he retorted with a smile at the computer. He realised too late that Chantelle was listening when the young blonde nurse gave him an odd look. He raised an eyebrow at her but it didn't faze her cheery curiosity. She smiled brightly, shrugged and bounced away to her patient, obviously yet to hear how Mr. Hanssen had walked into the hospital with the dreaded Ms. Campbell in his arms.

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**Hope this is alright!  
Please feel free to review and tell me what you thought!  
Sarah x**


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